UK datacentre jobs forecast exposes competing measures of economic value

Planned UK datacentres could directly employ about 10,400 permanent workers, according to research by thinktank Verdant, placing its estimate well below the more than 40,000 jobs projected by industry body TechUK.

The figures are not directly comparable. Verdant examined 20 projects with publicly available staffing data and focused on permanent workers needed to operate and maintain facilities. Its analysis excludes temporary construction employment and is based on public records and international comparisons, rather than a complete census of planned projects.

Verdant says existing datacentres have created fewer than 4,400 direct jobs, equivalent to 8.6 jobs per megawatt of energy capacity. It estimates future facilities could create as few as 1.6 permanent jobs per megawatt as projects increase in scale.

The government rejected Verdant’s jobs-per-megawatt comparison as misleading, arguing that it confuses electricity capacity with consumption and overlooks the wider economic value of computing infrastructure. It also cited national-security and digital-sovereignty arguments for building domestic capacity, including reducing reliance on overseas computing for sensitive health and defence data.

Labour has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure to accelerate planning and has defended rapid expansion. The policy has faced opposition from the Green party in England, which has called for a moratorium, while protests have taken place in Scotland amid concerns about datacentres’ demands for energy and water.

TechUK said its estimate that the industry could support 40,000 additional jobs by 2035 used published industry data and standard economic-impact assessment methods. The dispute leaves the central policy question unresolved: whether datacentres should be assessed primarily through direct employment or through broader claims about strategic and economic capacity.